Known as the premier global business space event, World Space Business Week (WSBW) 2025 was held at the Hôtel du Collectionneur in Paris and brought together more than 220 executive-level speakers and industry leaders for a week of networking, deal-making, and in-depth discussions that are shaping the future of the satellite and space industries. Among the notable speakers was Adel Al-Saleh, CEO of SES, who shared important insights after the company’s merger with Intelsat.
During his fireside chat, Al-Saleh noted that numerous decisions had already been made about product portfolios and reported significant progress in team integration and achieving synergies. He emphasized the urgent need for SES’s MEO fleet and stated that they “couldn’t wait” for the remaining mPOWER satellites to be launched because they were “already full” and needed on orbit. This demonstrates SES’s rapid expansion and the demand for Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) capabilities.
He expanded on this idea by outlining SES’s future approach to network development. He explained that the company would pursue incremental, software-defined platforms that are flexible and adaptive rather than creating isolated “islands” of solutions. SES recently announced a collaboration with K2 Space, which is a key component of this approach. By combining K2 Space’s agile engineering capabilities with SES’s decades of multi-orbit operating experience, this collaboration aims to accelerate the development of SES’s next-generation MEO network.
Al-Saleh described this as a significant change for the satellite industry, moving away from rigid, legacy waterfall development models and toward iterative innovation cycles that respond quickly to customer needs. He emphasized the importance of collaborating with partners like K2 Space to combine SES’s operational expertise with new space agility saying, “Our future MEO network will evolve through agile innovation cycles.” To shorten traditional timelines and deliver high-value network services faster, development efforts include an on-orbit mission scheduled for the first quarter of 2026 that will span both Europe and the U.S.
SES’s broader MEO strategy highlights open architecture, software-defined capabilities, modular growth, and dual-use applications for both government and commercial customers. Ultimately, multi-mission capabilities will be supported by the future MEO network, including space situational awareness, direct-to-device data relay, hosted payloads, sovereign services, and resilient communications for enterprise back haul and mobility.
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